Bohemia by the Bay

CHRISTOPH MAYER, 36, seems like the quintessential denizen of a hipster-rich locale.

His outfit is usually some variation of black nerd-chic glasses, skinny pants and an Army cap. He plays the harmonium. He owns Nina Hagen albums on vinyl. His collection of found objects retrieved from various curbsides includes a 1940s-era metal fan, a large rocking horse and a Rollfast bicycle. To top it off, he is from Berlin.

But soon after moving to Williamsburg in the summer of 2000, Mr. Mayer, a singer-songwriter and landscaper, developed a genuine fondness for the North Shore of Staten Island, where the Manhattan ferry docks.

Mr. Mayer also realized how much he stuck out on the island. There was hardly anyone else like him around.

“In the beginning,” he said, “people would ask me: ‘Hey, you live here? Why?’ People didn’t understand what the hell I was doing here.”

Even as New York’s hip young things invade and colonize neighborhoods near, far and out of state, Staten Island has stayed stubbornly uncool. It remains the forgotten borough; even the success of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan did not remove the island’s seemingly impenetrable veneer of hiplessness.

Blame the former landfill. Blame Melanie Griffith, she of the Aqua Net hair and adenoidal voice who immortalized the stereotypical island lass in the 1988 movie “Working Girl,” until she ousted her mean boss (Sigourney Weaver) and lost her frizzy mullet.

But slowly that is changing. Within the past few years, a small but growing number of hip young things have begun staring in the face of the island’s lack of coolness and embracing it, to the delight of local boosters. A report released in the spring by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy group, recommended denser development near the ferry to attract more young professionals and artists. But a good many are already there.

Some of the new hipsters were born and bred on the island, and after sampling life elsewhere decided they liked the place of their birth and their like-minded indie friends.

Others have packed up their guitars, their ironic T-shirts, their dark, square-rimmed glasses and their porkpie hats. They bade goodbye to the Village, Williamsburg or Long Island City, took a deep breath and crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, drawn by beautiful Victorian houses, low rents, hills and trees. And they have never looked back; at least they have tried not to.

Creative types who move to Staten Island typically end up on the North Shore, home to the neighborhoods of St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton, and the place where much of the island’s small but vibrant underground indie scene thrives.

Compared with other areas of Staten Island, the neighborhoods there are poorer, older and more diverse, home to graceful Victorian houses, thriving Sri Lankan and Mexican populations, much of the island’s public housing and its greatest incidence of crime, though as is true citywide, the crime rate is a fraction of what it was in previous years.

Residents of the North Shore often speak of a dividing line between the island’s northern and southern parts. The South Shore is generally whiter, wealthier and more conservative than the neighborhoods to the north. As Adam Ferretti, a local indie musician, said of the South Shore, “It’s where people put big cement lions on the front lawns.” But the stereotyping runs both ways: many South Shore residents view the North Shore as a dangerous ghetto. And while artists and musicians have gravitated for years to the North Shore, a vibrant local scene never quite emerged.

Mr. Mayer was introduced to the North Shore seven summers ago by an artist friend. In visits to the island, he came to love the shopworn diners that still served egg creams, the dive bars filled with die-hard, and sometimes dying, drinkers, and, perhaps most of all, the rents. That November, he and a roommate moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a blue town house in Stapleton. His rent was $450 a month.

Mr. Mayer also took a rebel’s delight in embracing a place many New Yorkers love to loathe.

“As a German, I see it from the outside, and it is very interesting,” he said one day recently, sitting in his third-floor apartment. “To me, it’s very much what New York City was. Manhattan is not like it was pre-Giuliani. But in Staten Island, you can see the past through a lens. The old convenience stores. The hardware store run by an old man and his mother.”

Photo

Trish Strombeck and Christoph Mayer of Trish and Christoph.Credit
Christian Hansen for the New York Times

Two years later, Mr. Mayer asked his girlfriend, a teacher named Trish Strombeck, to join him. She had been living in a rat-infested apartment in Williamsburg and needed little persuading. “Whenever I visited him,” Ms. Strombeck said, “it felt like a mini-vacation.”

Shortly after she moved in, the couple began performing as Trish and Christoph, singing irreverent but tender anti-folk songs inspired by the island and especially their neighborhood, with its ugly duckling charm. They married in 2004 and finally settled in St. George.

Mr. Mayer plays the guitar and narrates a slide show that both celebrates and takes digs at the island. Ms. Strombeck plays a small drum kit and shakes a shaker. They sing about the loneliness of life on Staten Island, the prevalence of nail salons and the abundance of vinyl siding. They have released two CDs, called “Songs From the North Shore (Volumes 1 and 2),” that include titles like “North Shore, Sweet North Shore” and “Please Move to Tompkinsville.”

“It is our muse,” Mr. Mayer said.

The pair also began holding backyard parties with bonfires and music that have enticed their friends from Brooklyn and even Manhattan. They figured that friends who saw the island’s beauty and possibilities would move there.

“But no one followed,” Ms. Strombeck said.

“Nobody,” Mr. Mayer added.

Williamsburg Without Irony

As it turned out, Mr. Mayer and Ms. Strombeck did have some like-minded neighbors, and more kindred spirits move to the island every year. Gradually, like refugees thrown together in distant lands, they found one another.

“Unfortunately, I guess we’re considered hipsters,” Mr. Mayer said. “And we know the few other hipsters that are here, too. If you have a hipster in a deserted, Midwest-style borough, you stick together.”

Most of their friends are couples in their 30s who, like them, moved to the island for its affordability and space, often with procreation in mind. Among them are Wilder Selzer, a performance artist, and his wife, Ann Marie Selzer, who directs film festivals.

The Selzers moved to the island — he from Long Island City, she from SoHo — after getting a grant from the Neighborhood Housing Services of Staten Island that allows people with modest incomes to make down payments on homes. The couple, now parents of a toddler named Lucy, have developed a grudging affection for the area’s working-class vibe, its tiny ethnic diners and its leafy open spaces.

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“I still have resistance to being here; it comes in waves,” Ms. Selzer said. “It is the forgotten borough, the goth borough of loneliness. My husband says it’s like Williamsburg without the irony.”

The couple’s circle also includes Sara Valentine, a member of the Hungry March Band, who moved to the island in 2003. Ms. Valentine was a bartender at CBGB who lived in a Williamsburg loft once deemed the best place in the city to see an underground rock show. But she felt that she had burned out on hipster Brooklyn, and she developed a deep desire to live near trees.

Now Ms. Valentine and her husband, a musician and D.J. named Kris Anton, pay $375 to rent a cottage on a farm in Stapleton that belongs to a nudist. Last spring, Ms. Valentine represented Staten Island as part of the “Best of the Boroughs” festival at Performance Space 122 in the East Village. She is also project manager for the Staten Island Composers Project, an Oct. 27 concert that will feature the local musician David Johansen of the New York Dolls.

A Cutting Edge, Sort Of

Despite the enthusiasm of some North Shore expats, an enduring local issue is that not much is going on, and that on weekends people need to leave the island for fun. But there are a handful of places to hang out locally, among them the Cargo Cafe, which has vintage fixtures and artfully peeled wallpaper, and is the closest thing on the North Shore to bohemian chic.

Another attraction is the Every Thing Goes Book Cafe and Neighborhood Stage, a hippie magnet where Mr. Mayer and Ms. Strombeck often perform. The place is owned by the Ganas commune, a group that drew headlines in May 2006 after one of its former members shot, though did not kill, one of the organization’s founders.

The restaurant Martini Red plays host to local bands, and Enoteca Maria, an Italian place, has been warmly reviewed. To much local delight, the gorgeous baroque St. George Theater reopened in 2004, albeit with often shopworn acts; recent performers have included the late-’70s group Air Supply.

Photo

The recording studios in Stapleton are used as a hangout.Credit
Christian Hansen for the New York Times

Still, local offerings are scattershot and thin, a fact that has confounded some North Shore boosters. If SoHo, then Williamsburg, then Fort Greene have been colonized by the young, the hip and the artistic, why not Staten Island’s North Shore?

One theory, paradoxically, is simply that the North Shore always been home to stable communities.

“The big difference between here and the ghetto warehouse area that turns into the funky art space that turns into the yuppie zone with arugula salads and wine bars,” said Mr. Selzer, the performance artist, “is we didn’t start with the bombed-out zone.”

It is unclear how many newcomers or businesses have recently alighted on the North Shore. But some see momentum as more hip, or hippish, and young, or youngish, people move to the neighborhood.

Recent arrivals include the painter Cynthia von Buhler, who two years ago moved to the island from the meatpacking district with her then fiancé, Russell Farhang, a jazz violinist and manager at a hedge fund from Park Slope. They bought a castlelike home on a hilltop in St. George and got married in its backyard. Ms. von Buhler is also relocating her studio from the meatpacking district — and trying to persuade other artists to do the same.

“The idea is to get more cafes and galleries and more artists here and make this better,” Ms. von Buhler said. “I’d like to be the glue that brings people together.”

Others are skeptical that recent changes will ultimately make a difference. “It is not where it wants to be,” Mr. Mayer said. “And people who have lived here for years doubt whether it’s ever going to get there.”

Separation Anxiety

Perhaps the biggest hurdle between Staten Island and coolness is the most obvious and intractable one of all: the ferry. No other direct transit link with Manhattan exists, and the half-hour ferry ride cements the separateness.

“There is nothing worse than it being 4:29 a.m. and you’re in Manhattan and drunk and running for the ferry,” said Tim Duffy, a 25-year-old islander and lifelong ferry catcher. “Because if you miss that, you’re waiting till 5:30 a.m.”

Yet despite the ferry, or because of it, a thriving and tight-knit group of homegrown indie and hipster types has germinated on the North Shore. These born-and-bred Staten Islanders, largely filmmakers and musicians with a penchant for kitsch and vintage clothes, often hang out in a derelict warehouse on a dead-end street in Stapleton where they rent rehearsal studios.

Two of the group’s anchors, both 27, are Mr. Ferretti, a singer and guitarist with the band Dead Rabbit, and Marisa Cerio, who wears cat’s-eye glasses and plays experimental electronic music.

Mr. Ferretti and his boyfriend, Andrew Phillip Tipton, rent a top-floor, two-bedroom apartment in a Victorian house for $950 a month.

Ms. Cerio, a gallery assistant at the Brooklyn Arts Council, still lives with her parents, which, as it turns out, is a very Staten Island thing to do.

“A lot of people who live in the middle of nowhere are incredibly motivated to move to New York City and do whatever they have to do to live there, to work all hours to live in a closet,” Ms. Cerio said. “We’ve grown up here. The motivation to get out of the house is not as high as for someone who lives in the middle of Kansas.”

The other day, lounging in one of the cozy practice studios, Ms. Cerio and her friends listed the things they once hated but now cherish about their home. The quiet. The trees. The sense of community. Sometimes even the ferry.

“I know it sounds like a whole lot of justification,” Ms. Cerio said. “But if this didn’t exist” — she gestured to her friends, sitting shoulder to shoulder, filling the studio with laughter and smoke — “we’d be trying to get out.”